Our Newest Vista OEM: Apple

It would seem to me that a post in a developer/designer oriented blog such as this looses some credibility when you diss on Apple in favor of MS in such an obvious way.  On top of that, your post had the opposite effect on me as you might have intended.  If Apple people are truly buying 10% of new Vista licenses, that says to me that one or more of the following must be true:

A) Vista sales are doing so poorly that 10% of all licenses purchased are by Mac owners.   If sales were higher to the general population, the percentage would be much smaller.
B) Vista needs so much horsepower that one must buy high end hardware to run it, like Mac hardware.
C) Misleading stats.  People who happen to own a Mac for testing or other purposes (like web developers who own an old blue-berry iMac just to make sure their pages look good) happen to buy a new PC with Vista installed.
D) Apple is doing so well selling hardware that their users make up 10% of Vista users, a la Boot Camp.

Extra Credit) Misleading headline.  Apple isn't buying these licenses.

I am not a Mac fan boy.  I have been programming Windows for 10 years.  I enjoy the Mix blog as such, but please don't be a marketing mouth piece for MS, especially with such obvious FUD. 

This is a great bit of data:

"10% of all new Vista licenses are sold to Macintosh owners"

I would love to know the source, and if it's in a larger report, how to obtain/purchase that.  Otherwise, if this is an internal Microsoft number, can you provide any more details (what market(s), how the terms "owner" and "new Vista license" are defined -- sometimes these terms, though they seem basic, mean different things to different people).

Thanks!

I have thrown out Vista.  We did extensive Vista testing at work.  Of 35 developers, not one was impressed with Vista.  These are young guys that are really into the new .Net stuff coming out.   Our QA department detests Vista.  It really torques me off that MS cannot come through on this.  It torques me off more that they don't seem to understand where so many of us are coming from.

Seriously, Apple has a point with their commercials: Tiger was about equal with XP IMO, but Vista is a step back compared to Leopard.  I used to be the poster child for Mac hate, but now Mr. Jobs and Co are taking over.  The last 5 years at Apple have been nothing short of a revolution.  Outside of the .Net group at MS, the last 5 years have been, well, they have just been.  Don't get me wrong.  The work MS is doing with .Net has me pumped.  .Net 1.0 through .Net 3.5 has held my attention pretty firmly.  I also love the new SQL Sever.  I have been an C# fan boy since Beta 2 of .Net 1.0.  The development work they are doing is great.  But oh how Vista sucks.

If I had installed Vista on my regular work machine, I would have downgraded just like the Mac ads.   I remember when Windows 2k came out.  I was so stoked.  NT4 was so incredibly unstable, and 98 was not enterprise.  Windows 2k changed all of that.  Then XP just built on that.  What a great OS!  I really wish MS would just release DirectX 10 for XP so I could see that claimed WPF rendering benefits of Vista in an OS that both my customers and I both use and enjoy.  This is coming from a guy that was waiting for Vista to come out, used it extensively at work, and hated it.

I plan on buying a new laptop this Xmas (prolly a Dell or HP) and I am going to get XP, not Vista.  And I plan on developing .Net 3.5 apps with it.  I hear SP1 is nothing new, so I guess I will hold out until SP2 to see if Vista will ever improve.  That is how bummed.

Please note: This is all just my own personal opinion...

I just read this blog entry and I am the guy who was the original poster. Why turn a great post about how people can design for XAML and Silverlight on just about any platform including the Mac, into a Vista vs Leopard argument.. The point of the whole post is that Silverlight is platform agnostic and works everywhere and you can design for it about anywhere.. Including the Mac under it's native operating system.

I wrote the posting originally because I wanted designers to know they can develop XAML on alternate platforms (including your platform of choice whether it is the Mac or it is Vista) and people are doing it and they want to know how.. 

I know quite a few designers who run both OSes on Mac hardware. Everytime I go out to a design firm and work on a project or give a talk on UX design I see MacBook Pro's running Vista, I am not kidding on that fact they tell me it's the "BEST OF BOTH WORLDS". I hear that comment a lot. I think Allen makes a good point that Microsoft does sell a lot of Vista licenses to Mac folks. But I also know these same people also still use MacOS with some specific applications.

When someone comes up to me and asks me about Vista (yes, if you look in my office I have several Macs and several Windows boxes, including one running OS X Leopard and one running Vista)  or Leopard I just relate my own experiences with it which over all have been good for both platforms.

And yes Apple has centered their advertising around anti-Vista advertising (the mac vs pc stuff that gets lamer all the time-IMHO). That doesn't mean people aren't buying Vista though (the sales numbers really do speak for themselves) that I have seen in the press, I wish Microsoft would release some PR with real number break downs including OEM and boxed copies.

As a designer I am for freedom of choice.. Vista running on Mac hardware does work incredibly well.

As for the negative comments about Vista, remember we haven't had a Vista level Server product yet for networks, and I expect early next year we will see Windows Server 2008 that will change the equasion quite a bit (along with SP1 which I hear is far from "nothing new").  This really reminds me of the adoption situation with early Windows 2000.

I have to hand it to Microsoft for supporting an OS with about a bazillion different machines from different manufacturers on the planet. They are a software maker. Apple makes and sells hardware (on only a few machine configurations), they only have to support with their OS the hardware that they make. That's a lot easier than supporting everything and everybody.

If you have to support as many configurations and machine makers as Microsoft does, there's bound to be an occasional hiccup. It's certainly a different level of complexity if you think about it than what Apple has to go through with a release vs Microsoft.

A lot of people got stung with Vista driver situations early on because their 3rd party hardware maker didn't have drivers available. That's simply a problem with the 3rd party makers, who didn't want to touch Vista or revamp products till after there was a release product. This was something Microsoft had little control over. That situation I would say is very near an end with drivers finally there now for most everything. However it's a problem with third parties in the Windows market. The customers need to let those 3rd party hardware makers know that LATE drivers are "unacceptable" considering they probably had close to two years with the specs to develop them. Again thank goodness this isn't much of an issue now. If you look historically this happened during Windows 2000 adoption as well.

People also dislike User Account Control and the pop-ups they sometimes perceive that as slowness.. I would tell you it's a safety feature that you can "turn off".. Simply go into the "Users" control panel and turn it off (and then do your speed comparison).. Things will feel again like they did with XP all snappy and happy.

Microsoft warns against this because your machine will be more susceptible to malware, but you are no more in danger by turning it off than you were in XP.. So it's your choice to use it or not use it.. Personally the pop-ups from UAC don't bother me, because it lets me know if something happened or is happening that I don't know about (like an invading program to my OS) and I like that. Even Macs make you type an administrator password when you install something new or warns you with a pop up if you are running something you downloaded off the internet.  By the way, when you plug Vista into a network with a security policy (like windows server), user account control goes away in favor of your Network Administrator's security policy if he's got it set up that way.

Another nice feature for web design folks is IE protected mode, that protects the rest of your computer from internet malware by putting a "fence" around the browser so nothing can errantly leave (it's called a sandbox). This is something no other browser or OS seems to do yet..

I like Vista and Leopard both, however one is not that far from the other honestly if you want to be fair about it. Both have their own sets of minuses. Leopard already released version 10.5.1 to remove some true "GOTCHAS", including a data loss bug when unplugging a USB hard drive during a copy..

Personally if you like OSX or you like Vista it's freedom of choice and competition always breeds better products for the entire marketplace. There are some positiives and negatives to both, in the long run isn't this all really about creating better software with technologies that enable us ?  XAML and Silverlight are very much cross-platform technology and there is a very persuasive argument to be creating software for them, no matter which OS you live and work in. We have more in common than we have different.. Competition is good for the market, that means things will get better faster with products we can all love and enjoy.

Let's not do the comparison thing, lets just be happy that it's 2007 and we have two really great competitive products offering choice.. On the Mac I have, I am running Vista under parallels, which is really interesting to have Mac applications running along side Vista apps in the same "screen" real estate. Virtualization brings some interesting possiblities.. The new frontier isn't which OS you are using, I bet in just about any today you can get done what you want, but in things like RIAs and browser applications that are platform and browser agnostic..

-Don